Implement a “transparent” corporate e-mail system, with anyone within the organization able to search the content of any published e-mail.

Problem

Access to critical information has been closely associated with positional authority, leading to “Balkanization” of key data and suppressing the emergence of “natural” leaders within the organization.

Solution

Retraining of the organization as to the “culture” of e-mail, with expectation set that all e-mails are the beginning (first “thread”) of a company-wide forum, rather than a private conversation.

Development/licensing of a robust search methodology that allows users to perform contextual searches of e-mails, and to sort/filter results.

Development of an accompanying reputational capital system, allowing the relative value of people’s contributions and their degree of collaboration to be assessed and rewarded (i.e. those individuals whose e-mails were often searched and forwarded/replied to would be awarded a higher score).

Development of an e-mail scoring system, by which employees are scored on the efficiency and effectiveness of their e-mails.

Practical Impact

Improved quality of decisions, by virtue of increased availability of critical information and Greater cooperation within organization, as information serves as the incentive.

Benefit: Increased cross-functional collaboration within organization

Metric: Increase in cross-functional e-mail traffic

Benefit: Reduction in unnecessary communication (due to ability for seekers of information to retrieve needed information on their own)

Metric: Reduction in overall e-mail traffic

Benefit: Increased employee trust levels, thanks to employees feeling they are being trusted with critical information

Metric: Increase in employee satisfaction levels

Benefit: Increased management visibility as to employee concerns, by virtue of ability to monitor the frequency of key searches

I really like the general idea of extreme transparency, but I think you've overshot the target. I'd like to propose a modification of your idea that achieves the same ends with a system that's more focused and perhaps more plausible.

First, let's retain the idea that some communication is, and should be, private. Just exposing "everything" does not necessarily provide any real value and likely goes beyond the point of diminishing returns. Plus, private conversations will still occur, they'll just go underground. Second, let's distinguish between emails that are just communication only and those that are about taking action. The conversations that matter are the ones that have to do with actually accomplishing a task or delivering an outcome - i.e. people making requests of each other that others deliver on. These conversations for action are what really add value and moves the organization forward. Furthermore, one can make a reasonable argument that new outcomes are the stuff that should be exposed because it's the outcomes that affect everyone.

That said, we can envision the whole organization as a network of interrelated and interdependent action/delivery-based conversations. The CEO makes requests for certain outcomes from the VP's, the marketing department makes requests of engineering, project managers make requests of team members, employees make requests of HR, managers make requests, etc. Visualizing this network of request-to-delivery conversations would indeed provide spectacular insights and could reasonably be shared with all. As you point out, "leaders" would emerge. "Reputations" would be built on the basis of on-time delivery statistics, and "scoring" would be based on actual metrics. Of course, to actually do such a thing, would take a very forward-thinking company where a fundamental culture of trust already exists. Very rare today, but I'm betting those companies are coming, and we're building the software tools they will need to support this type of transparency.

"Development of an e-mail scoring system, by which employees are scored on the efficiency and effectiveness of their e-mails." That is a great idea!

Originally email was a very practical way to distribute more quickly the MEMOs of the 80's. It now has reached a ridiculous volume. It is used in lieu of IM, Texting, and Telephone. If people had to type and print and distribute their email the way they did the MEMOs of the 80s, they would certainly think twice before writing. And they would think twice before "cc'ing" half the company... How often have you been copied on a memo and wondered why on earth you should care?

email scoring system? Is this the begining of the Semantic E-mail or E-mail 3.0?

Kahatika is something like this, although Kahatika incorporates more elements of the business system in it's design.
Innovation can no longer work in isolation. Gunter Pauli speaks of it in terms of physical resource management but the same applies to Human Resource Management. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBp6z4j704

I love the idea and the thoughtfulness of the approach. I see email as selfish and an impediment to innovation for many of the reasons given above (link to my thoughts below). Do we want to keep email in this top positive of organizational communication? When I read, "expectation set that all e-mails are the beginning (first “thread”) of a company-wide forum, rather than a private conversation" I wondered whether this could be a two step hack: Create an expectation that email should be 1% of the communication and that company-wide forums should take over the lead. Would this juggling help with some of the challenges noted?

reducing an organization's dependence on email by transfering communications to more flexible, transparent, and open collaboration platforms would certainly make a big difference. Do you have examples of organizations that have made real progress at this challenge? Would also love your thoughts on whether such transition is more likely to happen bottom up (e.g., by the initiative and tenacity of individuals who serve as examples for others) vs. through a deliberate effort that involves the entire organization (e.g., a platform is built so that everybody can be encouraged and supported to make the shift). Or perhaps a combination of the two...